


Homesick Ghosts

by sunflowertype



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Introspection, M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-22
Updated: 2019-11-23
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:00:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 9,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21525598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunflowertype/pseuds/sunflowertype
Summary: Slowly, Steve and Bucky drift back into each other’s lives.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 11
Kudos: 36





	1. P R O L O G U E

**Author's Note:**

> This has been sitting in my drafts since Winter Soldier came out. It's old and clunky, and while not exactly how I wanted to present it, here it is anyway.
> 
> (Note: please hover over non-English texts for translations! Also, this almost completely self-beta'd, please excuse my many mistakes.)

> How many loved your moments of glad grace,  
>  And loved your beauty with love false or true,  
>  But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,  
>  And loved the sorrows of your changing face;  
>  — _William Butler Yeats (When You Are Old)_

  
  


The low hum of white noise slowly clears from his head. With some effort, he manages to open his eyes and chase away the thick fog of lassitude that urges him to fall back into the darkness. His mind is quiet, empty. It takes him a moment to orient himself, and to realize he's experienced this sensation before.

This is the calm interim of waiting for instructions.

The buzz of electricity is not quite gone, vibrating under his skin, making his fingers twitch where they sit on his thighs. Foreign hands move about his face. One tugs at the mouth guard, sliding out from between his lips easily. Another hand is there to wipe away the trail of saliva that tries to follow the rubber piece.

He's completely malleable, moving with the hands pulling him into an upright position. They turn his face side to side. He flows with the motion. The hands lift his arms. He lets them drop back into his lap. The various hands reach out to touch, to prod and poke. There are voices around him, steady movement, and blurs of white coats and black combat boots.

Between long blinks, he watches these people and their movements. Who are they? What is he doing here? неважный. He jerks at the sound of the voice in his head. The small movement sets off a flurry of motion and voices around him.

"Ist er ansprechbar?"

"Ja, er ist ansprechbar." A light is suddenly shining brilliantly into his eyes. It moves from one side to the other and he follows the bright point absently. "Wie heißt du?"

Who is this man? He thinks, but only with the most abstract sense of curiosity. His thoughts are distant from himself, fuzzy and unfocused. He's always left dazed after being put in the chair. Why do they put him in the chair? The face before him keeps talking, but his ears are still ringing and he can't make out what the man is saying.

Why is he here? From the back of his mind, the voice from moments ago sounds again. неважный.

A sharp, open-palmed slap focuses his attention. His eyes snap to the aged face before him.

"кто ты?"

He thinks for only a moment before the voice in his head slides out of his mouth. "Зимний Солдат."

The man nods, satisfied with the response. The code name settles into his skin, becomes him. He knows who is. The Asset. A weapon. He is the Soldier that helped shape the century. All of his other thoughts shut down; they are unimportant.

"Your priority is Steven Grant Rogers. You will **eliminate** anyone else who gets in your way." He holds up a picture before the Soldier. "ликвидировать цель."

The Soldier doesn't recognize the face staring back at him, or the stars-and-stripes uniform, but he commits the photo to memory in perfect detail. Even the small letters in the bottom corner of the picture that read: **Steven Grant Rogers. Captain America—The National Icon.**

"He is your mission. устранить миссию."

Without forethought or further prompting, the Soldier repeats his instructions. It's what he's been trained to do. Compliance will be rewarded.

"ликвидировать."


	2. O N E

The Soldier comes up out of the Potomac gasping. The taste of river water and ash mix in his mouth as he struggles to keep himself and his cargo afloat. His lungs, still burning from the smoke he inhaled when he jumped from the helicarrier, heave behind his ribs. He takes in several mouthfuls of air until his respiratory rate evens out enough for him to make his way to the bank.

_"You've known me your whole life."_

Нет. The Soldier shakes the voice out of his head. The move, and the weight of the Mission, sends him stumbling a few times in the loose sand beneath his boots. It takes him no more than a minute to recalculate and counter-balance himself. Finding his footing in the riverbed, he shifts his hold on the still body, dragging him with his metal arm rather than carrying him to the Potomac's bank.

He lowers the American onto the mud. The Soldier watches as Steve Rogers remains still.

_"You're my friend."_

Нет, he thinks, shaking the voices out of his head again. Нет. The Soldier doesn't know this man. Except for the itch in the back of his head that says otherwise, it says some part of him did know. When he'd been dangling from the burning helicarrier, the Soldier watched as his Mission plummeted into the depths of the river; something inside of him did know Steven Grant Rogers at that moment. Pieces of him moved through the Soldier's compromised memories like a ghost.

It was then that he made his decision. For the first time in—he doesn't know how long—the Soldier thought for himself. And it wasn't about him in any way, that first thought, or the disaster happening around him. It was of a man slowly sinking out of view into a murky river.

_Save him._ The thought rose up inside of him with a swell of panic and urgency. _He can't swim!_ While the voice in his head sounded like his own, it was unfamiliar, like it was coming to him from somewhere far away.

The Soldier lost sight of the Mission and there was no hesitation in his next decision; there was no real thinking about what needed to be done. He fell into the Potomac, following the American below the surface. His feet hit the water at the same time the ghost of a conversation exploded to life in his head.

_"How about you? Are you ready to follow 'Captain America' into the jaws of death?"_

_"Hell, no.That little guy from Brooklyn who was too dumb not to run away from a fight. I'm following him."_

Pulling the man out of the water had solidified him as something more than a mission, something tangible in the Soldier's fractured mind. He watches Steve Rogers lay still at his feet. He hasn't inhaled once since being set on the river bank.

The Soldier is about to drop to his knees to resuscitate him, to save him, but another volley of conversation from some lost time sounds in his head. It's his own voice again, distant and thick.

_"Breathe, Stevie. Just breathe."_

He grips his damaged right arm painfully tight with his metal hand. The pain anchors him to the present; to the now, where Steve Rogers finally breathes. His eyes flutter but do not open. There's a voice in the back of the Soldier's head and it snakes its way through his veins until his hands twitch. The voice reminds him that he has orders, that it would be easy to drop to his knees and wrap his metal hand the American's throat. _устранить миссию._

The Winter Soldier leaves his Mission alive on the muddy bank of the Potomac River.

He forces himself to turn away and marches, injured and soaking wet, into the woods of Maryland. With unsteady footsteps, he leaves the chaos unfolding in metropolitan D.C. behind. Instinctively, he keeps away from main roads, highways, and all heavily populated areas. 

The Soldier disappears into the American wilderness.

  
  


* * *

  
  


He walks for hours, walks until the catastrophe he left behind can't even be heard, but it's never far enough.

Every blink the Soldier gives into sends him reeling in and out of time. Each mile that he covers on foot is accompanied by short bursts of sound and image. He doesn't know which is past or present. They come on so fast and loud it's sickening. More than a few times, he is brought to his knees by their intensity, and when they pass he's left cradling his head on the forest floor.

He doesn't stay down long, though. He has to keep moving. They won't take him back; he _won't_ go back now.

It's a little before sunset, the sky hanging heavy and bruised-purple above him, when the Soldier finally comes to a stop. The clipped pace he'd been keeping has his lungs burning somewhat and the Soldier takes several measured breaths to ease the discomfort. Standing still means he feels the ache his legs as well. A result of not only the speed of his marching but the fighting hours earlier.

The downtime is necessary, though.

He needs to assess and plan. The Soldier lets his eyes wander as he thinks. He's deep in the woods, miles from civilization. Exact location: unknown. The Soldier can deal with that.

Without moving a muscle, he does a rundown of available weapons. He knows there's an extra Gerber Tanto sheathed on his back. His Mark II is long gone. There are four unused SOCP daggers strapped to each of his calves, hidden behind his boots. Under the leather covering his flesh arm is a garrote bracelet. The Soldier has one firearm, the TEC-38 still in its holster, snug against his thigh.

His metal fingers ghost over the gun. 

It had sat against his thigh all day, it's presence almost innocuous. Forgotten. Now it sits against his thigh like a weight. A reminder of the price that must be paid for disobedience and failure. 

The Soldier's pulse pounds in his temples, thundering through his head the longer his fingers rest on the weapon. He failed to complete his mission; he failed to serve his purpose. The Soldier knows he is beyond compromised. The two-shot derringer is his kill-switch. He is disposable; all assets are. His conditioned response, to pull the gun out of its holster and tuck the piece into his mouth with the barrel aimed slightly downward, pulls at his nerves. 

The compulsion simmers beneath his skin.

The Soldier moves his hand away from the weapon slowly. He's out from under the eyes of the handlers and controllers. He's on his own and he needs to conserve everything he's got. Which isn't much to go on, but he will survive.

Some creeping sense of knowing tells him he's survived worse with less.

The Soldier flexes his right hand. A spark of pain lights up beneath his skin but it's tolerable. His arm is dislocated at the shoulder, but he still has movement and feeling in his fingers. He knows he can deal with this too, thoughts of resetting it already running through his mind. The Soldier flexes his metal arm: functioning. Some of the plates are bent and damaged, but the circuitry and mobility seem intact.

Overall, he's in sufficient condition. All of his vitals were missed in the fight on the helicarrier. The American had intentionally missed; he'd remained on the defensive while the Soldier carried on offensively. Steve Rogers hadn't wanted to hurt the Soldier beyond what was necessary to complete his own mission.

Why? Why protect someone who was sent to kill you? Something cold runs down the Soldier's spine as the question spirals in his head. The answer comes on a voice that is tired, a little broke, but with such surety, the Soldier feels himself believing the words.

_"I'm not gonna fight you," the American says, dropping his shield out of a broken window. "You're my friend."_

He closes his eyes, but they still come. The memories. They play out like a reel of film except the film has been spliced together in all the wrong spots. He remembers the fight on the bridge. Vaguely, he remembers being on a rooftop and running. One memory plays out sickeningly slow behind his eyelids. The world spins and the Soldier grunts, dropping to his knees as it fills his head.

_The Handler, Pierce, talks but none of his words reach the Soldier. His foggy mind is struggling to focus elsewhere. The man on the bridge calling him Bucky. The same man on a train speeding through snow-covered mountains screaming for this Bucky._

_Is he Bucky? Why did he know that man? What's happening to him? The questions go around in circles in his head._

_Pierce stops talking, the Handler's face is expectant. The bank vault is quiet, the others in the room waiting for him to respond. The Soldier speaks softly the single sentence scratching up his throat._

_"But I knew him."_

_It isn't what the Handler wanted to hear, the Soldier knows somehow that what he said wasn't the right response. Compliance will be rewarded. He hadn't complied. The Soldier fights to choke back the questions that come rushing into his mouth, but the damage is done. The Handler is up, speaking to the others._

_"Wipe him and start over."_

He knew him. He really knew Steve Rogers. It circles in his head the way water does a drain. Around and around until that's all he thinks about.

_"You've known me your whole life."_

The Soldier lets himself fall among the foliage. Tears prick at the corner of his eyes and he isn't sure if it's from the pain bursting in his shoulder or from the fact that people have been taking pieces of himself away from him for who knows how long. That thought curls tight and hot in his chest. It feels familiar. Rage? Hate? He isn't sure, but the Soldier thinks it's been simmering under his skin for a long time. It feels like the kind of thing he'll carry with him until he dies; invisible and indelible.

After some time, the Soldier moves his right arm out until it lays at an angle beside him. Carefully, he slides his arm up until his hand brushes the top of his head. He grits his teeth against the pain, closes his eyes, and reaches over his head with his left hand to slowly pull at his right. The dislocated shoulder settles back into place with a satisfying pop.

The relief is so sharp and welcoming a groan rolls out of his mouth before he can think to stay silent. He steels himself out of reflex for the reprimand; he is conditioned to suffer in silence. Nothing happens, though. It dawns on the Soldier that there is nothing waiting for him. No violence. No pain. No cold sleep. He pushes himself up off the ground and back against the tree nearest him.

свобода.

It comes to him first in Russian, spreading through him slowly, starting warm and soft in his chest. He watches the sun slip behind the trees and the smooth way the darkness falls over the forest. 

_Freedom_ , he thinks. It solidifies itself in his head, in his chest. The thought sends painful, ice-like numbness shooting through his veins. It fills him almost to burning. The Soldier thinks about grabbing the TEC-38. For one overwhelming minute, he doesn't want to be free; he wasn't trained for this.

He wasn't aware of his chest heaving until he tries to catch his breath, tries to make it stop. It's too late, though. Bile rises hot and acidic up his throat and he almost vomits in his lap. The Soldier manages to lean over at the last moment, puking on fallen leaves rather than his legs.

There isn't much in his stomach to empty out, but when he sits back against the tree, wiping his mouth, the Soldier feels better for it. He's no longer overwhelmed. The forest stirs around him, its nocturnal inhabitants waking. He sits and lets the night swallow him.

The Soldier doesn't sleep. He can't, not when closing his eyes could mean being taken back. No, he'll wait in the dark, awake and armed, for anyone who tries to ambush him. The Soldier won't go back to the chair or the cold sleeps. Ever.


	3. T W O

After what Sam calls the “Top Secret Cemetery Meeting”, Steve moves out of the apartment S.H.I.E.L.D. caged him in. It’s not home anymore. He needs a place where everything he does isn’t recorded, or monitored, in some way. Steve needs a place where there isn’t blood on the furniture and bullet holes in the wall. _Two slugs, no rifling. Soviet-made._

Steve goes back to Brooklyn. 

He doesn’t care that the move makes him an easy target, that it paints a big bullseye on his back. He’s going home and he doesn’t go alone. Sam tags along, too.

The place they move into is a far cry from the S.H.I.E.L.D. approved apartment in Washington. It's cramped. The AC hardly works on a good. The walls are so thin Steve sometimes thinks he can hear his neighbors breathing. He doesn't care, though. It's _his_ place. (And if it reminds Steve of days gone by, well that’s just fine too.) 

There are no bugs in the walls. There’s no undercover agent planted to be his friendly neighbor. Just Sam a few doors down. Sometimes there’s Natasha. On rare occasions, there’s Clint. 

Most of the time, it’s Steve and the innocuous folder that sits on his counter.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
It isn’t a thick file, exactly thirty-six pages, but it takes Steve two weeks to read through it. The careful and deliberate brainwashing of one Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes is documented in typed up reports and handwritten notes. In between these pages are black and white photos, sometimes grainy, other times not. 

Steve gets sick at first. The clinical detachment in the notes regarding the experiments Bucky went through sends Steve stumbling to his rundown bathroom with bile licking hot and acidic up his throat. He throws up the breakfast Sam made him and spends the rest of the day with his stomach twisted in knots. 

Page by page, Steve follows the nightmare.

The people documenting Bucky’s descent into becoming the Winter Soldier never used his name again after page one. He was always referred to as Subject; by page four, Bucky didn’t know his name anymore when they asked. He was no longer his own person. Hydra had taken everything from Bucky.

By page seven, the nausea is gone, replaced with a soul-deep hurt. A black and white picture of Bucky, beaten and bloody stares up at him. His face is almost unrecognizable, but Steve would know the fire behind those eyes anywhere. Even when they were near swollen shut, he knows those eyes. The cold pride on Bucky’s face is haunting. Steve turns the photo over. On the back of it is a sticky-note with Natasha’s translation of the faded Russian scribble. _Lvovsky Field Training. Succes._

It takes thirty-six pages, ten of which are photographs, to rub Steve raw right down to the marrow of his bones. He’s only felt like this twice before in his life. The first time was holding his mother’s hand as she died. The second was holding out a hand that couldn’t save Bucky from falling. 

Steve finishes the file well after midnight. He puts the folder on the top shelf of his closet under a pile of his sketchbooks. What had happened to Bucky in those thirty-six pages was out of Steve's hands, but guilt and shame claw at him in equal measure.

He doesn't sleep for a long while. Instead, Steve spends the night lost in his spiraling thoughts of how he should have tried harder to reach for Bucky. How he should have tried harder to find Bucky after he fell.

It's almost dawn when Steve's eyes grow too heavy to keep them open. When he sleeps, he dreams of blood and snow and empty blue eyes.  
  


* * *

  
  
Sometimes, Steve will pull the folder down from the closet shelf, flip it open to the front page, and study the picture of Bucky’s sleeping face. It’s probably the only peace the man has ever known while in Hydra’s clutches. The thought never fails to make Steve ache painfully. 

This cycle goes on for weeks.

It’s a rainy Sunday morning when he pulls the file down again. The military record of service, deployment, and experimentation. Steve drags his fingers over the Cyrillic on the cover like he’s done so many times before. Управление КГБ по днепропетровской области. He opens the folder as he sits on his bed. 

The horrors contained in this unassuming manila folder aren’t any easier to swallow now that Steve has open and closed it more than a dozen times. He has to force himself to focus on the categorical details, making his own notes to distract himself from more gruesome ones.

The file is a bare-bones time of Bucky’s life after the fall off the train, the war. After Steve. The decades typed out in neat black rows; no space for memories or lost time.

Steve scrubs a hand through his hair. His eyes are drawn instantly to the photo of Bucky in the stasis chamber. Bucky in cryosleep is different from Bucky in normal sleep. His jaw hard where Steve remembers it being slack. Bucky had always slept with his mouth open, snoring quietly.

The memory stings, but Steve still smiles despite it.

Clipped at the bottom of the photo is another, smaller, picture of Bucky. Steve hadn’t given it much more than a passing glance when he’d first opened the folder, but now he runs his thumb over the image. It’s a faded photograph of Bucky in his uniform before he shipped out. He had it taken at the entrance of the World’s Fair before they met up with their dates.

“So you won’t forget me,” Bucky had joked as he stood in front of the photographer.

“Who could forget your ugly mug?” Steve remembers himself saying.

“All right, wise—” Bucky’s response was cut off by the flash of the camera’s bulb. The picture they were given, Bucky with his lips parted and eyebrow raised, immortalized him mid-snide remark. Steve had laughed himself into a coughing fit over it.

No one but Steve should have had this picture; he’d kept it tucked in his wallet. But he isn’t surprised by how far Hydra’s fingers could reach. He carefully unclips the small photo and holds it in his palm. 

It has the perfect dimensions for the wallet he has now.


	4. T H R E E

It's two days later when the Soldier stumbles, exhausted and dehydrated, across a stream. He'd been picking his way through the forest, scouting out the terrain and looking for a suitable water source. Food is something he knows he can go without for a while; he hasn't experienced any desire to eat since... He doesn't know when. Water, on the other hand, the Soldier knows is necessary for his survival. He hasn't come this far just to die of dehydration. 

The Soldier drops heavily onto his knees before the stream. Cupping his hands, he dips them into the cool water and his throat relaxes in anticipation. He's about to bring to the water to his mouth when a voice floats into his head. There is no accompanying memory flashes, just the smooth rumble of a man's voice.

_"Bucky, wait!"_

It isn't the first time, or even the second time, today that voices other than his own have filled his head. It is, however, his first time hearing this particular voice. The Soldier closes his eyes, focusing on the sound. Something about its familiarity makes his chest ache.

_"You gotta be careful where you drink, son. Still water will make you sick."_

The Soldier opens his fingers and lets the water run through them. It drips back into the stream. He observes its steady flow downward. The water is clear, sunlight filtering through it right to the bottom like he'd been taught. When did he learn that? Who taught him? He screws his eyes shut, willing himself to remember the man whose voice he’d just heard.

The Soldier kneels beside the stream for what feels like hours until it comes to him. Slowly, the world around him fades away. Gone are the quiet sounds of the forest, replaced instead by the staccato bursts of children laughing intermingled with loud splashes of water. A muddy, brown pond surrounded by sun-dried grass stretches out in the darkness behind the Soldier's closed eyes.

A family is gathered on the bank. A small group of women are gathered around a pregnant woman. They all coo at the small child she holds on her cocked hips. He knows the soft cut of her shoulders somehow, but her relationship to him is beyond his grasp. Sadness curls in his gut and he has to look away from her.

Closer to the pond, there are men dozing on blankets spread out on the stiff grass. Several children play in the pond under watchful eyes. At the muddy bank, a man is kneeling beside a young boy. He smiles and the age lines that crease his face are so familiar the Soldier has to suck in a sharp breath.

Something punches through the Soldier then, jarring from his mind a date and place. Shelbyville, Indiana. 1928. The memory fades and he finds himself trying to physically bring it back, reaching out with his metal hand like he could hold on to it. A desperate anger seeds inside of him and the Soldier drives his fist into the soft ground.

He will remember.

The Soldier doesn't stay knelt down for long. He drinks his fill of water and follows its flow downstream. He doesn't have any particular destination or plan of action. The Soldier _wants_ to move, to be in control of himself. It's why he doesn't sleep; he can’t control what happens to him when his eyes shut. So, he stays on the move. 

He's exhausted, but the Soldier doesn't allow himself to fall into the sleep his mind desperately wants. Marching through the woods day in and day out keeps him awake. And there are the memories. He fights back his exhaustion in hopes that some new piece of whatever, or whoever, he was will slot into place.

The Soldier pushes himself to his limits because there is no one else around to do it for him.

He steps over the trunk of a fallen tree. It's overgrown with vines and moss, still slippery with this morning’s dew. In his fatigued state, the Soldier doesn't notice the large hole in a particularly rotten spot on the tree. He miscalculates where to step down with his right foot and puts his boot  
through the hole.

The Soldier goes down hard and fast on his metal arm with a sharp sound of surprise. His head smacks the ground, bouncing twice off the forest floor, and sharp pain cracks through his skull like lightning. The Soldier, stunned, lays where he fell and stares up at trees as they spin slowly around him.

A feeling that he'd fallen before, a long time ago, comes over him. It had happened in a cramped room. He had tripped over his own feet, distracted by something. 

_"Been walkin' long, Barnes?"_

The amused tone of the voice in his head is so sweet and familiar it's almost painful. He'd fallen because something about the scrawny body that the voice belonged to distracted him. Why? The Soldier closes his eyes in a long blink and tries to recall the specific moment, but all he gets is the tail end of the memory.

_"Whatta ya talkin' bout, blinky? You didn't see nothin' with those bad pies of yours."_

A low pitched, exasperated laugh ghosts through his ears. The Soldier doesn't bother picking himself up this time, too fatigued and weak to even try. Instead, his ears strain to catch the last fragments of what the voice in his head is saying. The last thing the Soldier hears before sleep swallows him like an ocean wave is that sweet, familiar voice calling him a jerk.

He doesn't know why that sends a slow burning thrill through his chest, but it isn't unpleasant so he does nothing. The Soldier falls asleep smiling.

_There's fire in his veins. It sears through his muscles right into his bones. He's screaming, the sound echoing in the room and down the empty corridor he'd been dragged through kicking and swearing. He'd fought with his captors every step of the way until they strapped him to the gurney._

_He fought and swore until they put the fire in his veins. Over and over again. Eventually, he stopped swearing, stopped fighting, and started screaming. He screams until he can't. His voice breaks but he doesn't. They can put as many needles as they want in his skin, but he isn't giving the Nazi bastards anything more than what the Geneva requires him to._

_"Sergeant... 3-2-5-5-7... Barnes..." Is he Barnes? The words come out of his mouth with no weight. He's been saying them for so long he doesn't know what they mean anymore._

_Someone rips off the straps holding him down. A man stares down at him. The man says a name, calls him Bucky._

_"It's me. It's Steve," the man says. His blue eyes are too goddamn earnest for this hell hole._

_Why is Steve there? Bucky blinks, staring up at a familiar face on an unfamiliar body. "Steve?"_

_There's a cool touch of leather to the side of his face. It brings the chill of winter and a train speeding around a mountain. Steve reaches for him but it's too late. The train is going too fast and it's too cold to hang on. Bucky falls reaching out for Steve._

The Soldier's eyes snap open. His chest is heaving, his heart thundering in his ears. It sounds just like the wheels of the train in his dream as they hit the tracks. The cold is still at his back, sending chills up his spine, and his arm is still outstretched. It glints in the faint light of the moon.

His heartbeat, which had been normalizing itself, picks up again. The arm stretched out before him is made of metal. That's not his arm. He tries to shake it off, tries to ignore the soft mechanical whirring coming from inside the metal. _It's not my arm._ Something twists inside of him. The Soldier squeezes his eyes shut. He can't look at it. _It's not my arm._ Stomach acid washes up hot in the back of his throat and he swallows several times to keep it down.   
Tears burn behind his eyelids.

The fingers on the Soldier's flesh hand scramble to pull at the metal. His real arm had to be under the metal. His fingers slide along grooves and under some of the warped plates, but it doesn't give. He can't get it off. Why can't he get it off?

Terror and desperation burn through him like wildfire. There is nothing but fire inside of him. They put it in his veins. He didn't want them to, but they did. The Soldier screws his eyes shut harder, hard enough that white dots speckle the blackness. 

It's from the darkness that a face appears. Porky Pig, the Soldier knows he called this round-faced old man Porky Pig at least a dozen times, spat in his face, before the injections and the fire in his veins. He'd been unafraid and angry at the balding, wrinkled doctor. 

_"Get your goddamn hands off me, you fuckin' quack!"_

Behind his eyes, the old doctor’s mouth moves, thin lips curling into a thinner smile.

_"Sergeant Barnes, the procedure has already started."_

Arnim Zola took his arm, took many things away from him. The fury that cuts through the Soldier is a semblance of what he'd felt before on the doctor’s table. He isn't in a run down lab and Zola is far away, but the fire rages inside of him anyway. 

It surrounds him.

A heat hotter than anything he's ever felt, even hotter than the heatwave in '36 when it peaked in June, rises from under his feet. There's a fire spreading fast and uncontrollable below him. Steel shakes and groans from all directions. Someone is shouting at him over the roar of the blaze.

_"Just go! Get outta here!"_

Familiar stars and stripes. The Mission. Steve Rogers willing to throw his life away to save him. No. Not like this. Hell is burning under his boots and his heart is thudding painfully in his chest, but he knows he would rather fall into the fiery pit below him than leave Steve behind.

The Soldier slowly opens his eyes, avoids the glint of his arm, and stares up at the black sky above him. The words he'd shouted at Steve back all those years ago fall out of his mouth soft and easy like he'd said them just days ago. 

"No, not without you," he says thickly. The Soldier closes his eyes once more, exhausted but content. His mind is quiet, at ease, and maybe that's why a smiling face flashes behind his eyelids. He knows this face.

"Your name is Steve Rogers, and I remember you."

The Soldier is asleep moments later, blue eyes guiding him into warm darkness. He isn't plagued by memories or nightmares. It's a long, undisturbed sleep.  
  


* * *

  
  
Sunlight splashes warm across the Soldier's face. It's nice, welcome even. His skin is heavy and wet with dew. The Soldier doesn't wake up quickly; he's comfortable despite the ground he's laying on. Instead, he rouses up slowly because something inside of him says it's what he used to do. He listens to the forest and drifts in and out of sleep to the sound of birds singing and cawing.

It's only when something snuffles at his hair does he crack open his eyes. 

At first, the Soldier can't make sense of the soft tufts of brown fur rubbing along his temple, but then a single wet, brown eye blinks at him. He keeps himself as still as possible. Without having to think about it, he knows this is the closest he's ever been to a deer in his whole life. He can hear others shuffling around him, curious but not enough to want to wander closer. 

The fawn bleats softly but it's right in his ear and the Soldier has to fight to not jerk away from the sound. The little thing snuffles his hair again, decides it likes the scent, and takes a mouth full of it

_Steve would love this_ , he thinks suddenly. The thought—the knowing that Steve would love to immortalize this moment on paper—makes him ache, but it's a soft ache. A good ache, like when Steve grabbed his hand as they rode the Cyclone in Coney Island. Before the ride even finished its climb upward to the start point thin, shaking fingers wrapped around his in a white-knuckled grip.

_Bucky_ wanted that moment to last forever.

The name tears a wrecked sound out of the Soldier's throat, something choked and panicked. Distantly, he's aware of the thundering of hooves as the deer flee but it's that name, _Bucky_ , that crashes around in his head. Bucky. It reverberates in his head until he's dizzy with it. Bucky... Barnes. 

_"I'm James, but everyone calls me Bucky. You're Steve, right?"_

There's a child's voice in his head. Was that his voice? Had he said that? When did that happen?

_"Heya, Buck."_ That's a different voice, sickly sounding, but he **knows** it anyway. He just can't remember. The Soldier screws his eyes shut, hands cradling his temples.

_"James Buchanan Barnes! You get inside this instant!"_ It's woman's voice this time, tone shrill and authoritative. He knows this woman.

_Please, stop._ he thinks, curling on his side in the dirt. The Soldier moves his hands to cup his ears, but the voices don't stop. Volley after volley of voices burst in his head. The Soldier can't get them out of his head. He can't make them stop.

_"Sergeant James Barnes. Shipping for England first thing tomorrow."_

The taste of blood, salty and metallic, fills the Soldier's mouth. It tickles it's way up the back of his throat. He wasn't aware of his labored breathing but now every inhalation sends the taste into his nose. His eyes shoot open just to make sure he isn't drowning it.

The world seems to slow to a crawl around him as if he's the one spinning and the Earth is lagging behind. There's darkness creeping at the corner of his eyes and before the Soldier is overtaken by it, he hears one last voice. It's ragged, but the tone is all conviction. The voice belongs to Steve Rogers, reminding the Soldier of his name.

_"Your name is James Buchanan Barnes."_

He surfaces from the darkness like a man starved for air minutes later. The Soldier sits up gasping and heaving. As he works on controlling his breathing, he tries to remember what happened. He woke up on the ground, there were deer gathered around him, but after that is hazy.

The Soldier drags a hand over his face, frustrated. Helpless.

Had he been helpless in his life before the Handlers, and the orders in German and Russian, and the memory wipes? Had he been like this in his life with Steve Rogers? The Soldier finds himself snorting; he'd been a different kind of helpless where Steve was concerned. That makes him smile for some reason, but it drops off his face seconds later when he realizes he doesn't know what it means.

It's while he's trying to think about what exactly Steve Rogers had been to him that his stomach growls. For the first time days, maybe even weeks, the Soldier finds himself hungry.

Like a rubber band, his thoughts snap from Steve to the fuzzy memory of snow-covered ground and men sharing a heated meal around a small fire that may not exactly be Army regulated. The taste of burnt pork and salty water lays thick on his tongue. 

_Dum Dum is at his shoulder, smiling behind his thick frost-covered mustache. "You're gonna make a fine wife one day, Barnes."_

Just like that, the Soldier remembers happened before what must have been him blacking out. A myriad of voices had been saying one thing in different degrees of familiarity: his name. The Soldier rubs his grumbling stomach while he mulls the name over in his mind. 

James Buchanan Barnes. In his head, he hears a woman's voice— _his mom's voice_ , always sharp when he was in trouble. He _remembers_ her. Excitement threads through him and it takes some effort to not get ahead of himself. Slowly, he sounds out James in his mind and it takes a little more time, but it eventually pulls to the surface a man's voice. _Dad's voice,_ he thinks. The surety of that thought pulls a smile across his face. 

Nervous excitement buzzes through the Soldier, settles below his skin like pins. His heart beats like a drum in his chest. 

He licks his lips once, twice, and tentatively he says, "My name is James Buchanan Barnes."


	5. F O U R

When Natasha had handed Steve the folder in the cemetery, a plan started to build in his mind. It went something like this: After reading the file to learn what he could about the Winter Soldier, he’d set out to find him. He would bring Bucky back.

Except, things rarely go according to plan.

Steve tries to leave the country. He needs to get out there. He needs to find him—Bucky, the Winter Soldier, or whatever man is left in the wake of being out of Hydra’s hands. Steve aims for Russia. Germany. Cuba. The countries he remembers seeing in the files.

The dredges of S.H.I.E.L.D. influence mark him as a flight risk though, and Steve is turned away from every airport he steps foot in. Captain America is grounded.

Steve goes through punching bags at the gym like they’re going out of style. When he gets back to his apartment, Steve is sweaty and his muscles ache and he’s never felt more useless. (Except the one time, watching Bucky plummet, hanging on the train’s door.)

As he showers, Steve wonders how his body would handle swimming across oceans. He would swim to Bucky, if that’s what needed to be done. Bucky would say he’s gone soft in the head for even thinking about it. 

Steve doesn’t run for the ocean when he gets out of the shower. He goes to his closet for the file. It isn’t under his sketchbooks. Steve remembers putting it back after flipping through before he went to LaGuardia.

A blind panic he hasn't felt since running out into Times Square, awake in a time that wasn’t his own, fills Steve to the brim. He turns his apartment upside down and inside out. Steve only stops when he’s too exhausted to keep going over every inch of his apartment.

In the morning, he even ropes Sam into helping him, but the file is nowhere to be found. Steve doesn't stop searching, though.

Natasha joins the "party" and Steve pointedly ignores her wisecracks about his senility. Steve also ignores the looks Sam gives him. The looks that say Steve is better off not finding the folder. But he isn't; he won't be until any semblance of Bucky Barnes is returned to him.

Steve wakes up every morning for weeks hoping the file has made its way back into his apartment. Every morning there is no file to be found. By July, he’s traded in tearing his apartment up for casting long looks at his closet.  
  


* * *

  
  
Natasha calls him from Moscow early one morning in September. The file has been gone for four months.

“Every lab, every Red Room, is gone. Burnt to the ground,” she says. The nonchalance in her tone is underscored by something else. Something gleeful. “He isn’t here though.”

“You didn’t have to do this, Nat,” Steve swallows, wetting his too dry throat, “but thank you.”

She’s quiet for a long moment and Steve can hear her take a drink of something. “I think he’s stateside. I got wind of labs burning in Germany and Cuba a few weeks back.”

Steve’s heart lurches painfully in his chest. He closes his eyes against the sting of tears and the thread of hope he desperately wants to clutch at.

“Thanks,” he says again. “Take care of yourself, Nat.”

“Right.You too, Rogers.”

Natasha doesn’t tell Steve the labs burned down with bodies still trapped in them.  
  


* * *

  
  
Steve and Sam lean heavily on each other as they trudge down the stairs towards their apartments. Their footfalls are loud and clumsy in the quiet stairwell. The jet had dropped them on the roof of their building to minimize the number of people seeing Captain America and Falcon more than a little bruised from a battle.

New year, new enemies.

“Let’s not do that again anytime soon,” Sam jokes between wheezes. The smile he tries to give makes the gash on his cheek bleed through the bandage a bit. Steve agrees with a distracted huff. His mind is laser-focused on getting them both safely down the stairs. He'd taken a good knock to the head, not concussion worthy, but enough to have his ears ringing two hours after the fact.

Sam gets his apartment door open on the third try and Steve mostly has to drag him inside. He ends up hefting Sam into his bed, made up with military precision. He bites back a smile at the groan Sam looses when his head hits his pillow.

“Happy New Year!” Sam calls out as Steve retreats to his own apartment. His responding salute, a weak toss of his hand, goes unseen.

Steve doesn’t make it to his own bed. He collapses on the floor, just after he gets his door closed, exhausted to the bone.

Sometime later, in the early morning hours before dawn, that Steve jerks awake on the couch. He isn’t sure what wakes him, but it probably has to do with being on the couch when he distinctly remembers his cheek painfully meeting the wood of his apartment floor. 

He sits up, scrubbing a hand over his face, and then stares down at the blanket from his bed as it pools around his hips. His bare feet hang off the arm of the couch.

Steve is up in seconds, checking his door (locked) and the windows (also locked). The hair on the back of his neck stands up. He’s been in this apartment long enough to know when something feels different.

His boots are by the front door where he usually leaves them, but Steve doesn’t remember taking them off. He pads quietly to his room and finds his shield (someone had pulled it out of the Potomac along with his body) leaned against his wall, also the usual spot he keeps it in. He remembers it being strapped to his back when he passed out though.

On impulse, and with his heart in his throat, Steve reaches for his closet door. Anxiousness coils hot and tight in the pit of his stomach. It makes his palms sweat against the metal knob. Taking a deep breath, Steve wrenches the door open. His eyes fly to the top shelf on instinct, and the breath he had been holding is knocked out of him in a silent sound of surprise.

His sketchbook is gone, but the Winter Soldier’s file rests in its place. A sense of knowing spreads slow and warm in the pit of Steve’s stomach.


	6. F I V E

Brooklyn is different now that James has the wherewithal to remember what it used to be like. He remembers the Dirty Thirties and being a teenager during the Depression. The streets were gritty and mean in those days. Bucky remembers the forties, too. He remembers how the war was everywhere; it was in the papers and on the radio. He remembers the way it was in everyone’s mouth.

_”Did you get your orders?”_

_“The 107th. Sergeant James Barnes. Shipping for England first thing tomorrow.”_

New York itself is a beast James barely recognizes. It’s modern. Electric with energy and so much life it’s practically overflowing. It’s primal. He can feel the city thrumming like a livewire. Fifteen-stories up and the pulse of the borough he grew up in still pulls at him.

It’s the tug of home.

_“Don’t do anything stupid until I get back!”_

_“How can I? You’re taking all the stupid with you.”_

James puts his elbows on the guardrail and leans forward to stare down at the specks that are people and cars. From his spot on the top of the water tower, Brooklyn looks like a maze stretching without end. At one point, it had been just that for him when he first arrived. 

After the incidents of Washington, James made his way back to New York. It had been a slow, roundabout journey. First out of the woods, then across international borders, and finally back over several state lines. He had to stay under the radar while simultaneously trying to keep himself together. 

He’d lost himself in the streets of different cities, in different countries, as his mind slowly woke up after years of programming. 

Eventually, James returned to the United States, to New York, and the city consumed him effortlessly.

The city had been both too much and not enough for his thawing senses. He’d stayed though, thinking it was where he needed to be. And it was also _because_ he was _thinking_ that he stayed.

James had escaped into alleys, into tunnels, and into abandoned buildings just to listen to himself think. He never thought beyond mission parameters. He never thought in the cold of cryosleep. Under Hydra’s thumb, James wasn’t allowed to think. Acts of independence would be met with reconditioning and reprogramming. Someone would be at his side with electricity crackling at his temples if Bucky wasn’t singularly focused on whatever mission he’d been given.  
_“Wipe him and start over.”_

Thinking came after a blond man called him Bucky. Called him by a name that wasn’t The Weapon, The Asset, or the Winter Soldier. (A name James still can’t bring himself to use.)

He was thinking when he watched a man plummet into a river like a falling star. _Save him_ , had been his first thought. Save Steve Rogers. It had driven James to jump from a burning helicarrier into a murky river for a man who moved through James’ compromised memories like a ghost. Pulling Captain America up onto the bank of the Potomac had solidified Steve Rogers—mission, friend—as something tangible in his fractured mind.

_“Sometimes, I think you like getting punched.”_

_Steve’s bleeding lips pulled into a smile. “I had him on the ropes.”_

Saving Steve with hands that had taken so much life (hands that are stained with so much _red_ James isn’t sure they’ll ever be clean again) is what undid all the programming. Steve woke the Soldier up, but it was James Buchanan Barnes who fought to stay awake. He fought his way through the fog left behind by constant memory wipes and experimentation.

James was awake, aware, and that meant there were holes in his head that needed filling.

The Captain America exhibit in the Smithsonian wasn’t the first stop on his new, self-made mission. It wasn’t even his second or third. James went back to all the Hydra labs and hideouts that he could remember stepping foot inside of.

Most of them ended up being dead ends, empty of staff and all data purged from the few computers left behind. He didn’t stop hunting though, not until he found the skeleton crew of a Hydra cell holed up in the underground lab of a pharmaceutical company in Baltimore.

Alexander Pierce paid them generously for their R&D of behavior augmenting drugs. Drugs that James had been forcibly subjected to.

This was information he had to extract from the head of the research team—a Russian biochemist who had been assigned to maintain and administer the drugs to James for the last decade. The man didn’t need anything more than a hole in his thigh, a few inches from the femoral artery, for him to spill everything he knew.

“All of your files are still in Moscow. Except one that went missing. We believe it’s in the hands of Captain America.”

Although he was gaining a new sense of self with each day he spent out from under Hydra influence, it didn’t mean that all of his conditioning disappeared overnight. With the information he needed extracted, James left nothing of the lab behind in his wake. He would not be captured again.

His hunt didn’t end in Maryland though, just changed course for DC again. It was the last place he’d seen Steve Rogers.

James snorts, his lips twitching. A gust of wind blows his hair across his face, the ends whipping across his cheek. He tucks the lock of hair behind his ear and stares down at a particular apartment complex the water towers overlook. It all comes back to Steve. James isn’t surprised, though. He suspects that Steve will always be tangled somewhere in the long strings of his life.

The Smithsonian’s Captain America exhibit didn’t need to tell him how close Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers had been. The memories were already unfurling inside of his head, filling his thoughts with days gone by. When he slept, he had dreams of a cramped apartment, of lungs that struggled to breathe, of a small presence warm and solid curled against him.

James visited the museum until he memorized all of the information each wall; until he could remember for himself everything the walls said.

There were still gaps in his memories, holes the size and shape of a skinny Steve Rogers, that James needed filled. So, he made his way to Brooklyn. He made his way home.

His fingers, the ones made of flesh, twitch against the folder in his hand. He watches Sam and Steve exit the building together.

Finding Steve Rogers’ exact location wasn’t difficult, not when everything about him had been made a matter of public record. Not when every newspaper between D.C. and New York was printing articles on sightings of him. Finding him was easy; breaking into his new, unmonitored apartment was even easier.

James canvassed the place for a few days, watching the comings and goings of the building’s inhabitants. He spoke only with a few of the residents and spent the rest of his time eavesdropping when and where he could until he knew for certain that, with the exception of Sam Wilson and Steve Rogers, everyone who went in and out of the complex was civilian. 

He made his move when both men were out—Sam called away to test pilot a new set of wings and Steve, duffle bag thrown over his shoulder, left the building like a man possessed.

A part of James wanted to follow him, but he didn’t. Not right then; he hadn’t been ready. Instead, he slipped into the building, unseen.

It’s easier, familiar, the second time.


	7. S I X

Steve closes the door to his bedroom. He props his shield against the wall and then drops heavily onto his bed. 

His limbs feel weighed down. Steve hadn’t realized how tired he was until he wasn’t moving. He’s never been more thankful for the marshmallow softness of his mattress than right now.

Except when he wiggles closer to his pillow and something sharp digs into his spine. Steve paws at the covers until his hand closes around the hard edge of whatever he’s laying on. He yanks it out from under him and holds it up.

It’s his sketchbook. Steve has several of them, purchased after he was pulled out of the ice, but the one in his hand is the only one that is as out of time as he is. Steve sits up, propping himself against the headboard, and runs his fingers down the worn, cracked spine. Lip between his teeth, Steve opens it.

 _Property of Steven G. Rogers_ is scrawled in ink on the inside of the front cover followed by his and Bucky’s old address. But below that is a note written in a shaky block print Steve doesn’t recognize. 

_Is this home?_ The next note is neater but still looks like it was written by someone who hadn’t used a pen along time. _There’s nothing there._

Steve flips through the book and finds more notes scrawled in the margins of his drawings. Some of them describe the memory behind the sketch. Others are nothing more than a short, simple sentence: _I don’t remember this._

It dawns on Steve as he’s staring at the only full-color piece he’s ever done that these notes were left behind by Bucky during the time the sketchbook was in his possession.

The smile that pulls at Steve’s lips is pleased and mournful. Bucky had grabbed at his freedom with both hands, had clawed at anything to get his autonomy back, and Steve is proud and happy for him. But he mourns not being able to fill in the blanks _with_ him. He grieves not being there to tell him it was okay when he couldn’t remember.

Steve spreads his hand out over the drawing and closes his eyes. He sifts through his own memories until he’s transported to a sweltering Sunday evening in June of 1942. The sun is taking its time setting and the rays spill hot on Steve as he sits beside the window. His sketchbook rests on the sill. A cool breeze occasionally blows by to dry the sweat on his forehead. (If Steve tries hard enough he can recall the noise from the streets. The strains of a Bing Crosby song from the apartment below theirs.)

He’s pretending to draw the city before him in his new sketchbook, but what Steve is actually drawing is the long lines of Bucky’s body as he’s laid on their bed reading. He’s fresh from the shower and his dark hair curls limply without his pomade. He’s shirtless and in his skivvies. His right leg is drawn up, resting on the wall, while his left is stretched out a bit. 

Bucky has one hand propped under his chin while his other turns the pages of the dime novel he’d picked up after work. There’s a faint smile playing on his lips that Steve spends extra time on capturing in the right shade of pink.

Steve draws between quick, furtive glances at Bucky from the corner of his eye before ducking his head to sketch the dips and shadows of Bucky’s body. He adds color slowly, watching the way the sunlight falls golden on Bucky’s skin. Steve’s face burns with each look he steals. 

He's seen Bucky in the buff plenty of times, but it’s different now. He’d never been acutely aware of the tracks sweat made rolling down Bucky’s neck. Steve had never been so enticed by the dark trail of hair that ran down Bucky’s stomach and disappeared behind the band of his skivvies. Steve had never wished for laser vision until that lazy Sunday when he found himself shading in the shadows between Bucky’s legs while an erection stirred between his own.

Bucky laughs suddenly. It’s a soft sound, but it makes Steve jump in his chair with his heart in his throat. He jerks his eyes away from Bucky’s crotch, oblivious to the fact that he’d been staring, and looks up at Bucky’s face. A blush sets fire to Steve’s cheeks. 

Bucky is looking right at him. His eyes scan Steve’s face for a moment and then shift just beyond Steve's shoulder. All the while Steve’s heart feels like it's going to beat out of his chest.

“I know the view’s great and all,” he says slowly, “but you look like a tomato. Get away from the window, Stevie."

Steve’s heart slowly crawls back down in his chest where it belongs, but he feels sick anyway. His nerves are singing with embarrassment. Shame. He flips his sketchbook closed with shaking fingers. 

Steve had kept the drawing though, safe in his sketchbook. Bucky never snooped through his drawings, always eager and waiting for Steve to show him instead. He studies the picture without the familiar curl of shame that would pool in his stomach whenever he used to look at it.

He can appreciate his skill and Bucky's body without feeling like the police were going to bust down his door and arrest him for being in love with his best friend. He can appreciate it without the fear that said best friend is going to look at him as something less than desirable.

There's a note, written smaller than the previous ones, along the edge of the page Steve hadn’t noticed earlier. The letters cramped together, almost illegible. Unsure. Steve reads it over and over until his eyes ache with unshed tears.

_Did you love me?_

There’s a pen clipped to the back cover, the end slightly chewed, and Steve unclips it. He hesitates for a moment, feeling a little silly, but he presses the pen to the paper anyway. 

Below Bucky's note, he writes, _I still do_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had roughly six versions of this, each with their own different "chapters", and none of them finished. After five years, I finally decided to piece together the more cohesive parts and combine them to make something a little readable.


End file.
